Use These 3 Growth Strategies for Your Business In This Bear Market The current bear market means plentiful opportunities for businesses. Taking steps now could prepare you for the next bull market — and even give you an advantage.
By Adir Buskila Edited by Kara McIntyre
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
We see a lot of startup founders turning to Web3 models, and a lot of established Web2 companies are already taking a step toward upgrading. With companies like Nike, Adidas, Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter, we can say for sure that leaders are predicting that the future of the internet will be Web3-based. As more and more entrants join the space and create great companies, they're heavily affected by the crypto market, which is currently in a bear market.
As both cryptocurrency and Web3 come from the same technology — that is, blockchain technology — many people confuse Web3 with cryptocurrency and even think they are different names for the same thing. That's not the case.
Web3 and cryptocurrencies are not the same things. Sooner rather than later, the Web3 market will detach from the crypto space and join the startup economy, which trends more toward user statistics valuation rather than investor speculation.
It's the wild west out there. Some tokens are down drastically as seen on Coingecko, and the market is bearish. We're seeing a decrease in users who actually uses the apps themselves (look at Sandbox, Decentreland, Opensea, etc.). This tells us something that is very important to note — the investors are the users, which leads to use only when the market is bullish. Imagine a company where the entire user base is made up of people who actually use its app for its utility, instead of just trying to make a profit.
Now, here's how to grow during a bear market.
Related: How Your Business Can Thrive in a Bear Market
1. Build better foundations for your company
Further optimizing and building during a bear market is one of the best things you can do for your company. Go through your processes, check what worked and what didn't, and optimize it as much as you can.
Before the market went down, we saw companies hitting ATH (all-time high) in two weeks. Making their company a unicorn for a few days is very appealing, and that desire probably led to many founders optimizing their projects to a bull situation filled with hype and FOMO (fear of missing out). While that can work perfectly for pyramid-based projects and high-yield projects, that is not the case for most of the Web3 space. That's why this is the time to build a better foundation.
Getting ready for the future is much easier during times like the ones we're in now when getting positive attention for your company is difficult. The worst thing you can do is to stop building and wait for the next bull. You may fall for the illusion that "every company does well in a bull market," but that's usually not the case. It's much harder to advertise and get real attention during hard times with all the noise going around.
2. Grow and nourish your community
I've never seen a chart that goes in only one direction, so neither bull nor bear is defining the problem to solve. It's the consistency of building a community of people that your product provides solutions to. Nourish the community relationships and make them feel like they are in a stable and caring space. That and only that will create a stream of revenue that fluctuates far less with the market. Getting the right audience in front of your solution during a bear market will prove how resilient your project really is and will indicate how well it will do in a bull market.
The Web3 space will lose its peg to the crypto market very soon and every big sector will be led by a company that supports or uses tokens to their users' advantage.
Related: Why the Bear Market is the Best Thing To Happen To Web3 and Cryptocurrency
3. Advertise and market in a personalized manner
Advertise and market your product to your audience. If you already have a product that solves a problem, your next task is to get it in front of the right audience. That isn't easy, but establishing your brand now is the best thing you can do for your company.
The advertising techniques used during a bull market, like sponsoring a soccer team or paying influencers, will not have the same effect now. The key is to build different funnels for different segments of your audience and optimize until you can grow and scale your marketing, or in two words: Personalized Ads.
The biggest ad networks like Facebook and Google are mostly rejecting Web3 companies, as they classify them as crypto-companies and they are not very friendly towards those types of companies. However, newer companies have joined the game and want to promote Web3 companies.
To wrap it up: it's important to state that every company will be affected by a bear market and Web3 companies are still getting wrecked by the crypto market. But companies that still bring utility during these strange times should focus on growing their user base and building their brand. I suspect such companies have a better chance of drinking tequila on the beach in the next bull market.
